Walter Benjamin and the Appropriation Through Location of History

The journey provided by a memory that is constantly accessible in the present moment provides the user with a more generous reading of the spaces being considered. William Blake let forth with a the thought "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." A phrase that found home later several times over. For Walter Benjamin in his own work, it would seem this template provided valuable ground to stand on. As Marcel Proust would pick up on the trail that had been left out with the prior generations writings and thoughts. Benjamin also took the fan of memory and shook it open and truly began to examine the contents of the folds in his observations on the city and his eventual science of it. In Benjamin's usage of the template that Proust had set up; where detail was the gold discovered in the metal. His attention to detail and the pivot points in which a particular memory was shook forth. With his pointed finger and his open eye Benjamin cast his glance to the spaces intersecting in the city and began to see the fragments and believed that they provided a more complete perception of the city. Benjamin felt that Proust was able to dissect a history that wasn't being recorded as such. 

The usage of the retro-autobiographical stance in unfolding social history can be aligned with a similar notion in regards to song or theater. History without personal interjection reads as static and somewhat empty, like a text book one gets for a class and then doesn't really use. One only gets to know what happened, possibly why that what happened, but more. It becomes a singular story of history. But, therein is something amiss. How it felt. Social history without personal interference is static and denies much of what was important about the moment in history socially: the people who were alive to see it and live in it. Without the personal inter splice into the fabric of the social history. How the moment felt, is lost.